Writings, Articles and Musings

Turning Breech Babies

Turning Breech Babies

Acupuncturists have been turning breech babies for several thousand years. As one might expect after all that time, we get pretty good results doing so. And while there are few actual statistics for this process, most experienced acupuncturists will have done this simple method successfully a number of times.

A woman recently came to me help her turn her breech baby. Unfortunately she came for just 3 sessions, which simply is not enough. Despite my best efforts, the sessions were unsuccessful. As often happens with such things, almost immediately after this another woman with a breech baby presented herself to me for treatment. Sheepishly, I took the opportunity.

She had been referred to me by her mother-in-law, herself an acupuncturist living in Florida (we’re in New York). I did the protocol, using both moxibustion (an herb heated and waved over a specific acupuncture point) along with certain pins meant to augment the treatment. After 5 sessions, baby still hadn’t turned. Shortly thereafter, Mom-in-Law came to New York and went at my client for 4 sessions. The sonogram showed still no change. At this point, thinking we had nothing to lose, I mentioned to Mom-to-be a protocol for turning breech babies, utilizing hypnosis. I could almost see the client, a Wall Streeter, mentally rolling her eyes at the idea of using hypnosis to turn a breech baby.

“I’ll try anything,” she replied. As if I had asked her to go out on the wing of 1930’s prop plane and hang upside down in order to turn the baby. My cause was helped, somewhat, when I showed her a 1998 study of 100 women who’d had hypnosis for breech baby. Of that number, 81 breech babies had turned. I admitted to her that I had not done this hypnotic induction before, but ‘if you’re game,” I told her as jovially as possible, “so am I.” Like offering to accompany her out on the wing of a….you know.

For the next 4 days we did variations on a specific theme, and using both hypnosis and acupuncture. On the fifth day she was to go in for an Epidural—something she was not looking forward to. The next day she went in to see the doctor…and baby had turned.

The technician said that, in nine years she had not witnessed someone who was about to go in for an epidural not needing one.

Needless to say, we were all thrilled—mom and dad more so, of course.

And me, I know that this wasn’t proof that hypnosis works, but I had a pretty strong feeling that it would. Yes, 26% of the babies turn spontaneously anyway. But just this once, it felt really good to be part of the 81%.